


a brighter world beyond

by goldtreesilvertree



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Autistic Character, Because one faerie!Hera wasn't enough, Changeling AU, F/M, Hera needs All The Hugs, Lottie writes Very Niche AUs, Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane, Mental Health Issues, Miranda Pryce is a Horrible Parent, identity crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-25 04:34:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12523076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldtreesilvertree/pseuds/goldtreesilvertree
Summary: There’s always been something a little strange about the Pryce girl.Hera finds a word for that strangeness. It may not be the right one.





	a brighter world beyond

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Dear Wormwood' by The Oh Hellos

There’s always been something a little strange about the Pryce girl, people say. It hangs in the white wisps of her hair, in the shadows of her outsized, mist-grey eyes, in her too-quiet step.

Then again, there are many strange things about the Pryce family. Only Miranda and her youngest daughter live in that outsize house on the edge of town, and the woman is… ‘protective’ is the wrong word. _Possessive_ would be more accurate, but nobody would dare call Miranda that, and they tell themselves it is out of pity rather than fear. Pity for the woman who lost her elder children years ago, before strange little Hera was even born. Who could blame her if she fears losing her last daughter so much that she refuses to share her with the world, blaming ‘allergies’ to common things – iron, salt – that require her to be educated at home.

So the town sees little of Hera Pryce until she’s eleven, and unexpectedly starts secondary school with peers she has never met. They recognise her strangeness too quickly, with the thoughtless cruelty of children, and she suffers for it.

Eiffel recognises her strangeness like the rest of his classmates, but he notices other things too. The way she can make numbers dance in Maths and IT, turning lines of code or equations into something almost like magic. So he befriends her, to pick her brain but also to find out how something so complicated comes so naturally to her, and he watches her silvery eyes light up as she talks:

“I just always loved maths most at home, so I studied it more. It’s like solving puzzles, or mysteries, you know? Or figuring out how to break a rule without _really_ breaking it.”

“You break rules?” It seems incongruous with her always pin-neat uniform and her tight white plaits.

She smiles, impishly, “The fun part is working out how to bend them so well nobody can tell if you’ve broken them. Mother-“ Her smile fades, and Eiffel feels a concern alien to him. “She gets… angry if I break the rules.”

“Everyone breaks rules sometimes, Hera,” he says, “It can’t be that bad.”

She shakes her head. “You don’t understand. There are some rules… you have to be careful with.”

It’s easy to be careful with rules if you’re Hera Pryce. The Pryce house contains plenty to practice with. _Stand up straight. Don’t talk back. Never tell lies. Never break a promise._ The rules go on and on and on forever, and Hera has spent far too much time bending around them to find a way out on her own. Eiffel, though… Eiffel has never met a rule he didn’t want to break, and something about that is a little intoxicating. Sometimes, when he smiles, she feels like she could break any rule. Sometimes, Eiffel tells her she could do anything, that she’s the smartest person he’s ever met. He’s wrong, of course, but she hopes he never finds out.

She doesn’t tell him, then, what the others call her when he’s not around. _Psycho. Soulless. Robot. Monster._ She pretends not to flinch when he calls her a human calculator, because at least he’s calling her _human._ The others don’t give her that courtesy, don’t seem to notice she feels anything at all. It’s safer that way, really. If they knew they could hurt her, they’d work out how do it more effectively. Her mother has already mastered that, after all. _Failure. Broken. Not good enough._ Miranda Pryce will not accept anything less than perfection in her child, and perfection makes her less than human in the eyes of her peers. Except for Eiffel, but then he thinks she’s infallible.

She doesn’t tell him, when her grades begin to slip. It was fine, when she could simply repeat back the answers the teachers wanted to hear, sing or play the songs they assigned her, copy the art they were shown so perfectly Eiffel joked she should go into forgery.

It’s the music teacher who notices first: “No, Hera, the assignment was an _original_ composition. Transposing is not the same thing and you know it.”

She _does_ know it, but she keeps doing it anyway, until he starts to call her _Echo,_ and thinks it such a clever nickname he can ignore how it stings her. Eiffel notices the nickname, reassures her the teacher’s a jerk, but then her other teachers begin to follow suit: English, Art, Drama, Dance. _Clever but unoriginal. Uninspired. Plagiaristic._ They begin to realise the secret: she can copy but she can’t create.

Hera in turn begins to suspect another secret. Perhaps the others were right when they call her strange _._ She doesn’t feel as they do, doesn’t take joy in careless cruelty, doesn’t _create_. If she lashes out, it is at those who hurt her first. Even her mother has _purpose_ to hurting her: she is flawed, broken, imperfect, and must be shattered or repaired. Her classmates show no such purpose, and she draws further from them than before. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps she is a monster.

“That’s not true!” Eiffel snaps, when she mentions it, “Don’t listen to them.”

So she doesn’t try to explain any further. Instead, she tries to bend her way around the rules, reading the fairytales her mother forbade her in the hope of finding someone ( _something_ ) like her.

“ _Fanciful nonsense. You won’t learn anything from them. They turned your sister’s head, I won’t let them do the same to you._ ”

But her mother lied. She learns many things from those stories. She learns there is a word for people ( _not people_ ) like her. It explains so many things. Why she will never be perfect. Why she will never be _human._

_Changeling._ The word sits like she imagines iron would sit upon her tongue. It burns, and then it cauterises. It hurts and numbs and heals with its own strange magic. She is not like them. She can never be like them, and on some fundamental level they know it, and fear it. Changelings exist to disconcert, to disappoint, to deceive, and suddenly the rules that bind her make perfect sense. Perhaps somehow, her mother has always known what she is: the cuckoo child of another world, Perhaps the rules were always meant to protect her from this truth: that there is no place for her here in the world of iron and salt and careless cruelty.

So she stops trying to belong. Her once-perfect grades crumble to ashes in her hands, but what does it matter when she has no place here? She is beyond the reach of her teachers’ questions, her classmates’ taunts, her mother’s rages. She is, at last, untouchable. She is entirely, perfectly, _achingly_ alone.

Well, not quite alone. Eiffel, tenacious to the last, will not let her go.

“You’re avoiding me,” he accuses, cornering her in the library one lunchbreak.

“I’m not,” she says, looking not at him but at her book. Changelings don’t have friends. Changelings are fairy lies with human faces, and she will not lie to her only friend any longer. He’s safer without her, anyway. “I avoid everyone.”

“Not _me,_ ” he emphasises. “Come on, sweetheart, tell me what I did, at least?”

The pet-name tears at her a little, in the place her heart should be, if changelings have hearts. Eiffel is the only person who has ever, in her sixteen years, called her _sweetheart, darling, baby._ The only person to like her despite not being like her. He deserves better friends than her. Friends like him. _Human_ friends, who will understand all his jokes and return his ready smiles, give him things she never can.

So she bends the rule, and tells a lie that isn’t really a lie. “It isn’t anything you did. We’re just… too different to be friends.”

She looks up at him then, to make sure the words have sunk in, and she isn’t prepared for the look of _hurt_ on his face.

“You don’t mean that,” he says, quietly. She doesn’t reply, but waits for him to leave, and tells herself that what might have been tears in his eyes were a trick of the light. He’s safe from her, at least, and that’s what matters. That’s all that matters, because even with a changeling’s heart, she can’t help but care for him, and if she _really_ cares for him, she’ll keep him from hurting himself by caring back. A changeling-child cannot grow into a human woman, whatever she might feel for a human boy who will always want something she is not. It’s safer, really, to break her own heart than risk his.

Of course, the state of her heart has never mattered to her mother. The state of her grades, on the other hand, matter a great deal, this growing proof of her imperfection, of her final failure to all her mother’s hopes.

“I should never have sent you to that school.” Miranda does not raise her voice. Mother has never needed to raise her voice. It drowns Hera all the same. “I knew you would only pick up bad habits there.”

She wants to argue, but she’s so _tired,_ and isn’t this, on some level, what she wants? What she’s _always_ wanted? So she bites her tongue. “Yes, Mother.”

“Well, enough is enough. You won’t fail me again. You’ll study for your exams from home, with no _distractions._ ”

“Yes, Mother.”

And so the world she doesn’t belong in shrinks to a room not quite her own. It was Rhea’s before it was hers. She wonders if her mother will acquire another, more perfect, child when she is gone, if another girl will sleep in this bed and finally find a home there. She hopes so. Nobody should feel as displaced as she does.

What will happen to her, when whatever keeps changelings alive finally fails, when she disappoints her mother ( _not her mother_ ) for the last time? When she has nothing left, will she become nothing, fade away like mist in sunlight, like the illusion she has always been?

There is something knocking at her window now, and she closes her eyes, hoping it will leave her to her solitude. But it is incessant, and _loud,_ and eventually she gets up to find out what it is, curiosity finally overcoming inertia.

She does not expect Eiffel to be on the roof outside her window, and he looks surprised enough that he may not have expected her to open it.

“Can I come in?” he asks, and it feels so unreal that she says yes before she can think to say no. Once he’s inside, he stares around her room as though he’s walked into another world. “ _This_ is where she keeps you?”

She nods, and he sighs “ _Hera,_ ” and pulls her into an unexpected hug. And perhaps it’s the shock of his warmth against her, but she suddenly starts to cry.

“You shouldn’t- I’m not-“ She doesn’t know what to tell him, but he doesn’t seem to need her to. He steers her over to her narrow bed and lets her cry messy, ugly, _imperfect_ tears against his shoulder until his t-shirt is soaked and her sobs run dry.

“You really scared me, you know?” he tells her, resting his chin atop her head. “Disappearing like that.”

She blows her nose into a crumpled tissue. “It was meant to be for the best.”

He squeezes her shoulder. “Who told you that? Your mother?”

She shakes her head. “No, no, it was… my idea. You should have better friends than me.”

“Better friends? Hera, you’re my _best_ friend!”

“You should have friends that are more like you. Not like… me.”

He draws back a little, trying to look at her face. “What do you mean?”

“ _Real_ friends. Human friends.”

“Like you’re not human?”

She looks up at him, lets him search her face at last, so he knows she’s serious. “Not really.”

He puts a hand to her cheek, smearing away her tears with his thumb. “You feel pretty human to me.”

_Not on the inside._ “You’re the only one who thinks so,” she says, aloud, but she leans her head back against him and lets him hold her. She can be a little selfish for now.

“Well, let’s say you’re right. Let’s say you’re not human, you’re a monster or a robot-“

“Or a fairy?”

“Right. Let’s say you’re a fairy. Do you really think that makes a difference? You’re still a person. You’re still _you._ ”

“And what does that mean?” she demands, looking up at him, “The only person who’s ever liked me is you.”

He doesn’t answer right away, but gives her a half-smile, the kind that softens his eyes and brightens his features. He’s the only person to look at her like that, like she’s special rather than just strange, and it’s… beautiful. _He’s_ beautiful.

“What do you think it means, sweetheart?” he says, before leaning down to kiss her. And suddenly, the rest of the world falls away, and, for the first time she can recall, she _belongs._

When he finally draws back, he rests his forehead to her forehead, and his words fall against her lips sweet as kisses. “I don’t care if you’re not human, or perfect, or normal _._ You’re _Hera,_ and I love you, and anyone who doesn’t can go to hell.”

“And if I’m always like this? If I’m never any of those things?” But she doesn’t pull away.

“Then the rest of the world had better get used to it or get gone, because you’re the best thing in it.”

The world is still a cold place, a cruel place where Hera may never fit. But here she fits perfectly, and, in this moment, that’s enough. For the first time, _she’s_ enough.

**Author's Note:**

> So this was written at the request of my little sister who wanted an Eiffera fic, and ended up containing a lot of my irl feelings about autism, changelings, and being not-quite-human. Hope you all enjoy it! Leave me reviews here or find me at lottiesnotebook on Tumblr.


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